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Dan Solin is the New York Times bestselling author of the Smartest series of books which include: The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read, The Smartest 401(k) Book You'll Ever Read, The Smartest Retirement Book You'll Ever Read, The Smartest Portfolio You'll Ever Own, 7 Steps to Save Your Financial Life Now and The Smartest Money Book You'll Ever Read. He is also the author of Does Your Broker Owe You Money? His latest book is: The Smartest Sales Book You'll Ever Read.He graduated from Johns Hopkins University, completed his first year of law school at the University of California Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

I have created a new benchmark against which investors can track the returns of their stocks and mutual funds. It can also be used to evaluate the performance of your "market-beating" broker or adviser. I call this index the Solin Random Stock Index (SRSI). Here's how I put it together. I took the spelling of my last name and punched each letter into the DailyFinance quote engine. Then I selected the first two stocks that appeared for each letter. My only criteria was that the stocks were listed on a U.S. stock exchange.Why should the SRSI be significant to you? Because 90% of individual investors rely on the advice of brokers and advisers who tell them they can put together a portfolio of stocks or actively managed mutual funds that will "beat the markets."

There is precious little data to support the existence of this skill, yet investors chase returns every day, to the detriment of their returns. While the SRSI is an imperfect benchmark, it will give you a measure of how a random portfolio stacks up against the "expertise" of your brokers and fund managers.

I was inspired to create the SRSI by Lusha, a chimpanzee in Russia. According to an article in the U.K. Daily Mail, Lusha's stock picks outperformed 94% of the country's investment funds. Her portfolio increased in value by 300%, leading to this insightful observation by the head of monetary policy at the Institute for the Economy in Transition in Moscow: "It shows that financial knowledge does not play a great role in giving forecasts to how the market will change."

Precisely my point.

I'll keep you posted on the performance of the SRSI in my blogs and on my web page. I am pretty confident it will beat the returns of most stock picking experts. Outperforming Lusha may be another story.